


south of an early summer

by tothemoon



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Canon Era, Developing Relationship, Implied Sexual Content, M/M, Relationship Study, Summer, alternatively: that weird nebulous place a new relationship can be
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-25
Updated: 2020-05-25
Packaged: 2021-03-03 00:07:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,602
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24375529
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tothemoon/pseuds/tothemoon
Summary: Warmth, then, was being wanted back. Two weeks later, Atsumu holds that warmth in by Shouyou’s waist; he watches it, how it sleeps, and wonders what the heat will become next.
Relationships: (the latter is super slight though), Hinata Shouyou/Kageyama Tobio, Hinata Shouyou/Miya Atsumu
Comments: 39
Kudos: 494
Collections: UWU MAX LEVEL





	south of an early summer

The wind only exists when Atsumu notices it out of his body, life sucked out of him and given to the air. It is late July when the city succumbs to its worst blackout in twenty years, and he finds that neither the heat, or the darkness have stolen his chance to breathe — no, this all is Shouyou’s fault, along with the bedsheet on the floor, and how things were going to go, anyway.

It was a wonder, that they were even able to find each other at all. A blackout in a familiar apartment might have afforded him some spatial awareness, enough to show someone to the door, but a new one meant the hazard of moving boxes, and the clothes spewing out of them like a volcano’s aftermath. And god forbid if someone turned an ankle in the dark. Initially, they'd laid out the bedsheet as a place to take their meals, an oasis in the unpacking frenzy; but an oasis became an island for them to not turn their ankles, or trip and die, and that was that.

Picture them now, in their 600-thread count country. When Atsumu gathers the muster to inhale, he presses the breath back into Shouyou’s mouth, his first time since dreaming of it a million years ago. He gives in because Shouyou gives back. A first kiss turns into a second, and then a third. He counts the amount of them in altitudes, in the way minds go thin and numbers fall away altogether.

Leave by sundown, he'd say to anyone else, regardless of blackout, and even if they'd have to run through a mountain pass to get back. To Shouyou, Atsumu says _stay_ , by a hand halfway up a shirt. “Stay,” he insists, not so much a demand, but the audacity to ask for more.

Shouyou takes his t-shirt off on his own, no white flag. He yanks at Atsumu’s, laughing, and lays back with too much ease for two people beginning in the dark.

* * *

By the time August barges in hotter than any month on record, their 600-thread count country’s moved to higher ground, onto a proper bed. They have no names for what they are, just the space they make: Atsumu goes by _left,_ while Shouyou takes _right_ , always to converge and call it middle ground.

On the morning it hits 34 degrees in Osaka, Atsumu wakes up with Shouyou stuck to the crook of an open arm. He’s finding that converging, for better or worse, means a lot of things: tangled legs, foreheads stuck, the sweat glueing them together. Atsumu turns to an air conditioner with a glare, as if to reprimand it, but finds nothing but a box recording arctic levels.

Atsumu launches a balled-up sock at it anyway. Power off, panels fold back in, spiteful in the attack. He reaches for the remote on the nightstand, commanding it to turn it back on, and Shouyou huddles in, muttering something about keeping it off altogether.

“How could you be cold right now?” Atsumu asks. “It's going to hit forty in the afternoon.”

Shouyou mutters, “yes,” completely missing the question. He rolls from the crook of an arm to Atsumu's nape and falls back into the heaviness of sleep. Atsumu decides he is dating a personal space heater, one that doesn't feel the warmth of his own making, and decides to keep him regardless.

In truth, Atsumu knows he is heat-seeking: not a missile, but someone intolerant to all things tepid. Coffee goes down the sink once it's gone lukewarm, food tastes better when it's scalding, and he’s come to detest all things _one-night-stand._ That was why, on their first night together, he'd asked Shouyou, point blank, ‘is this going to happen again?’

(And Shouyou answered by leaving three mornings later, sporting one of Atsumu’s shirts from the moving boxes.)

Warmth, then, was being wanted back. Two weeks later, Atsumu holds that warmth in by Shouyou’s waist; he watches it, how it sleeps, and wonders what the heat will become next.

* * *

Ten minutes in without the air conditioner, Atsumu only just notices that Shouyou’s side is closest to it. He proposes switching left with right, and Shouyou agrees to by rolling over to a new edge.

At night, Shouyou still clings in his sleep, but at least Atsumu can keep a cool back. He lets the whir of the AC lull him to sleep, fingers in Shouyou’s hair, like sifting for thoughts he can use to read minds.

Till morning, he dreams: of summer, and staying. He dreams of heat, never undone by cold or lack of interest.

* * *

There have been others. For Atsumu, they are flames long-extinguished, snuffed out with the coming of the end. The captain of the high school baseball team. A girl from Amemura whose name he can no longer remember. There are lots of people like this: either just vague titles like “marketing guy” or “sous chef,” and names, replaced by locations or completely forgotten altogether.

His brother, _the_ paragon for a life well lived, says it's cruel. Osamu’s come over to the apartment, because Atsumu has apparently stolen a large number of things from the move, in so much they need a separate box, to collect it all.

“Yeah, but there are over seven billion people on this planet,” Atsumu explains while on the hunt for Osamu’s supposed items. “No use wasting brain space on everyone that crosses your path.”

“What are you using it on anyway? Mental math?”

Osamu sits down amongst the unpacked boxes, still brimming with clothes, and sorts through shirts he thinks are his. He makes himself a giant pile, until one of the boxes is nearly empty, and proclaims that he's reclaimed his rightful possessions.

“There's no way those are all yours,” Atsumu says, snatching one of them off the peak of the shirt mountain. “You’re taking everything I have.”

“Yeah, because when we were living together, you'd just take everything _I_ had. You can buy your own shirts now. There's a Uniqlo in Shinsaibashi.”

Osamu sorts through them, holding them up one by the sleeves as if he's expecting to find holes. “Besides, it looks bad, right? _Man’s lover finds out Miya Atsumu owns none of his own shirts._ News at ten.”

The box goes empty, and two brothers see it as a sign of the times, of things stolen and shared, then ultimately returned.

“It’s just strange,” Osamu continues, counting the clothes in his stack.

“What is?”

“I've never seen you give anyone anything before. Even if they were my shirts to begin with.”

* * *

That night, after Osamu has left and Shouyou’s found his way back into the apartment, Atsumu presents him with ten new shirts from the Uniqlo in Shinsaibashi, complete with price tags and stickers.

“But I have plenty of shirts,” Shouyou says. “Why'd you go and buy new ones?”

Atsumu looks at the one Shouyou’s wearing, one that’s oversized in the way it screams, _I belong to Osamu._ He decides he hates it more than anything he’s hated in his entire life, and pulls Shouyou in closer by a cursed hem. “I,” he says, stopping. Atsumu does not want to be known as the man who owns none of his own shirts. “The ones you took are really old. And ratty. And stupid.” _Osamu_. “So I got you better ones.” _Mine._

Shouyou takes one of the pile and thumbs at the starchy fabric. “But you haven't worn them yet,” he says, and Atsumu swears he's been sucker-punched.

“Oh. Right.”

So Shouyou presses them back into Atsumu’s chest, head down at first before meeting him in the eye. He smiles in that wobbly way, like when his stomach is bothering him, or when he's still conjuring the words in the mouth.

But hear it now, the killing blow —

“They’d probably fit better, if you made them yours first.”

Atsumu’s fingers stay pinched on the hem of an old tee. He falls back on the new couch just assembled today, its existence made for moments like this; the new shirts pile over him like shock blankets, while Shouyou smiles, all earnest, unaware of the mess he leaves in his wake.

“So, what should I do with the old ones?” he asks, and Atsumu thinks of incinerating them off the face of the planet.

The warmth rises, a burn across the face. It singes his ears, and travels down to his stomach: it calls for all things yours and mine, only to throw them in the one big fire they call _ours_.

* * *

Sometimes, warmth is pure sun, the sort that rests on your back as strong as you can take it.

It is midway into August, at a V-League beach event, when Shouyou and Tobio race down the shore, kicking up sand and leaving everyone else in the dust. Atsumu examines the idea of old flames in their wake, and determines, with great clarity, that some might never burn out. To Shouyou, Tobio will never be the setter boy from Karasuno, or the Adlers guy, or any other vague gesturing into the past. To Shouyou, Tobio is Kageyama, and to Tobio, Shouyou is Hinata; family names become ancient names, said not out of formality, but something eternally familiar.

“No fair, Kageyama!” Shouyou yells, upward into the sky so everyone knows Tobio is a cheater. “You got a head-start!”

 _Head-start_. When the two of them decide to race again, right past Atsumu and up the shores they did not touch before, the word comes to mind like sand in the eye. This is what Tobio’s always had in terms of Shouyou, a head-start: first teammate, first quick, first love. Atsumu learns that some people claim firsts, and never give them back again; that some flames, no matter if they're small, go carried like Olympic fires, torches passed between the two of them forever.

If this were a larger matter, Atsumu would bitch about it to Osamu, or he'd go quiet and sulk about it for the next decade. But it's a jealousy he refuses to make big, for his own sanity, stubbornness — because even if some loves go on endless, they can never stay the same. Fires turn to ember, and then the small hum of smolder.

The two of them run back, steps slower than when they started. Atsumu waits for the both of them with water bottles in hand. They chug them down, thankful in giant gulps, and return to running races.

Warmth: the heat of recognition, and its constant flame.

Atsumu sits with it, alone in the sand, and decides there are some things he cannot snuff out himself.

* * *

Later on, with the sun halfway gone into the night, Shouyou comes to him with two sparklers in hand.

Atsumu remembers his own fires, just lit. There have been others, but infernos burn in the face of the past.

* * *

One the day Shouyou's own lease ends mid-August, Atsumu blurts out an unfortunate thing: “ _godShouyouwhycan’twejustlivetogether_.”

In an empty apartment about to be switched for another, Atsumu hears his voice echo off the four walls, like canyons raised to remind him of his stupidity. He knows these are not things to say, three weeks into a maybe-relationship; that no matter if one’s liked said person for a long while now — forever, really — that there are some things that take time and care and patience.

He takes a page out of Kita-san’s book. Atsumu remembers to breathe, as much as one can at a time like this, and declares he will buy them lunch and drinks from the convenience store down the block. He doesn't wait for Hinata’s answer. Shoes go on, heels sticking out of their backs; he curses out an old elevator door, whom Shouyou had deemed _turtle-san_.

In the convenience store, Atsumu paces up and down the aisles, collecting snacks before setting them down again. He comes upon the freezer and thinks — ah, ice cream, I'll just buy a ton of that, because then I’ll be able to segway into the heat and blame my delirium on that.

“Oh, you know how a day of moving goes,” he practices to a tub of vanilla ice cream. “In the summer, we all go a little mad.”

Nearby, a mother ushers her child away. She mutters something about heatwaves and how they make strange men. Shouyou, waiting behind them, does not avoid the day’s oddities.

He picks up the vanilla ice cream, dropping it into Atsumu’s basket for him. “I was wondering where you went. The movers came and took my stuff, so we’re done. We could even sit down and have lunch somewhere, if you'd like.”

“So you didn’t hear what I said inside?” Atsumu asks. “About, you know, getting us lunch from here? The stuff before that?”

Shouyou shakes his head, no. “What did you say before?”

Atsumu looks to the vanilla ice cream again, thinking of excuses he’s prepared, or the flat-out lies he could tell. But with strange seasons, he knows strange truths must come to pass — that to lie to Shouyou, even in the face of self-preservation, would mean a waste of breath like a blow to the stomach.

He remembers: how years ago, with finger pointed, he’d declared they would be playing together one day, and how that had come to pass.

“One day, we’ll share a bed,” he predicts, “without you having to go back to your own.”

* * *

In the face of the truth, Shouyou’s eyes light up. He says nothing, no yes or no, but Atsumu lives in his non-answer.

(He decides, on this day, that love is the way people look golden under convenience store fluorescents.)

* * *

On the last day in August, Atsumu runs up a steep hill in face of the hottest day of the year. It's a necessary evil, Coach Foster says, because jackals who can stalk in the day will never, ever die. That’s one thing, sure, but everyone begins to question their mortality when running turns to practice serves, then practice games, and diving drills until the night.

Dusk settles, heat still nagging in the darkness. Still in the mid 20s, humidity at an all time high, Atsumu wonders if it'd be easier to rest in an alleyway for the evening, instead of trudging the three blocks to Shouyou’s apartment; Shouyou, in turn, yanks onward him by the hand, as if to steer him back to life.

Inside, Shouyou showers first, before settling to towel off in his room. Atsumu, in the kitchen, drifts over a rice cooker. He curses the steam for rising, as if it's responsible for the heatwave across the city, and wanders over to Shouyou’s room to ask about take-out instead.

“It's too hot to cook,” Atsumu insists through a crack in the door, even if he was just going to pan fry up some eggs and marinated meat. “How about we order somen from that place nearby?”

Past the door, Shouyou sleeps without the AC on, a window cracked wide open as if this will change the hot air. Towel still wrapped around his neck, it catches his wet hair, while an oversized shirt collar finds the rest. To mediate, Atsumu lays beside him, arm placed under Shouyou’s head.

“Hasn’t anyone told you about sleeping with your hair damp?” Atsumu asks, though he knows he's done it a million times himself. Shouyou stirs closer, and lets his nose jab Atsumu’s neck.

A warmth comes welcomed, even when they're drenched, closer than close, in a season’s last sweat.

* * *

In a few hours, a heatwave will break.

(Others, god willing, will never.)

**Author's Note:**

> hello please take this humble atsuhina gift i am no longer a person
> 
> alternatively, this could have been called "warm-up" because this was a warm-up for me to write this ship more (get it? because this is a fic about warmth. lmao)
> 
> also u can find me on twitter at @sixthmoons!


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